Them prices!

Whats up with the ridiculous prices for magic items in this game? I just reached Kuldahar and Conlan is basically insane if he thinks people living in some backwater town in the middle of a place that no one visits ever can afford his stuff. I'm seeing stuff in the range of 30k - 50k, and I barely have 3500 bucks. Are those items supposed to be for HoF mode? because I remember that in IWD2 items in that mode were much more expensive (and powerful). In my last playthrough of BG1 I accumulated something like 160k and even that wouldn't be enough to outfit a party of 6 with the best stuff here.Anyways, just wanted to know if this is regular to the game or if I screwed something up, as I have installed tweaks anthology and a couple other mods.

Comments

Those are the normal prices. It's too much, of course, but thankfully you wouldn't actually need to buy anything from Conlan. The weapons and armours that you get from the various dungeons are enough to see you through the game. There's never enough money when playing with a party, but when you reach upto somewhere like Dorn's Deep, you will start getting much better weapons and other items than you can get in Conlan's shop. I haven't played HoF, so I can't tell about that, but in the normal mode, those magic items are practically just for display.

Edit: In fact, the most important thing that you should buy as soon as possible is a Bag of Holding from Orrick's shop. You'll run out of space very soon without it.

BG is a game of abundance. Give it a little bit of time and eventually you'll get everything you ever wanted. Every mage will have enough scrolls to learn every spell. Your fighters will have a large enough pile of gold to buy out the stock of every shop in Amn. If you see it and you want it, you just get it with minimal effort.

That's not how IWD works. You're way out in the middle of the wilderness, as far from civilization as you can get. IWD is a game of scarcity. You're going to see a ton of magic items you'd like, but can't afford. You're not going to buy out entire shops, you're going to scrimp and save in order to buy one cherished treasure. The game isn't throwing spell scrolls at you; there's *ONE* scroll of Fireball in the entire game, and if you have two arcane casters, well, one of them is going to be using his level three spell slots on something else. (And heaven forbid if you fail to scribe it, because then you'll never be able to cast it all game.)

Even the random loot system in IWD leads to scarcity. In BG2, I can plan out all of my gear before I start. My Kensai might decide to dual-wield Foebane and Belm end-game, but he'll put early pips into Katanas so he can use Celestial Fury as a bridge weapon, and so on and so forth. Planning like that in IWD is a fool's errand-- you'll want your party's proficiencies to cover a wide spectrum because, outside of a few fixed spawns, you're never quite sure what you're going to get. (That's also partly why shops are so expensive: they're some of the few "guaranteed" items you'll ever see.)

It's a huge shock transitioning from one mindset to the other, but in the end, I find the IWD method to be far more rewarding. You really start to value everything you get.

@SomeSort the scarcity of scrolls and the unreliable random drops are one of the big factors why I find IWD inferior to BG.

Different strokes for different folks. Some people like FPS games with ammo drops as far as the eye can see to support non-stop firing. Others prefer survival horror games where they're finishing enemies off with knives to preserve every precious handgun bullet. It's not that one is inherently better than the other, it's that they're meant to scratch different itches, and criticizing a FPS for having too much ammo or a survival horror for having too little misses the point.

I find that IWD playthroughs are a lot less formulaic than BG playthroughs, though, especially if you don't cheat on the 100% chance to scribe scrolls and you gratefully accept whatever the RNG gods deign to give you gear-wise.

It's a huge shock transitioning from one mindset to the other, but in the end, I find the IWD method to be far more rewarding. You really start to value everything you get.

Having played the game a bit more I'm really starting to appreciate this. It's true that BG can be very formulaic. The second I click "new game" I know exactly what my character will be wearing/wielding/casting -and exactly how the avatar will look- the moment I face Sarevok/Irenicus/Amelyssan.I think I'm even starting to like it more than BG.

@SomeSort I agree with all that except the formulaic part. There are FAR MORE weapons available in BG than IWD. If you find yourself using the same ones then, thats on you the player, and not the game offering alternatives. IWD is far more formulaic with its entirely linear progression and lack of weapon variety. Fights are solved in only a few different ways as well, due to the abundance of enemy immunities that discourage class experimentation.

@SomeSort I agree with all that except the formulaic part. There are FAR MORE weapons available in BG than IWD. If you find yourself using the same ones then, thats on you the player, and not the game offering alternatives. IWD is far more formulaic with its entirely linear progression and lack of weapon variety. Fights are solved in only a few different ways as well, due to the abundance of enemy immunities that discourage class experimentation.

It’s not that there’s only one formula. The route I’ll take with an Archer charname differs from the one I’ll take with an assassin. But the fact of the matter is that I can plan my entire playthrough out down to the tiniest detail from Candlekeep all the way through the Throne of Bhaal before speaking with Gorion. I get to decide what it looks like, but I can decide it all in advance. I can’t do that in IWD because I never know what I’m going to get.

(I’m also not sure what you mean about discouraging experimentation. I’ve rolled a ton of very diverse parties. In fact, since you make six characters instead of one, there are *more* viable party permutations in IWD than BG. The fact that druids and bards actually kind of rock also dramatically increases the number of viable parties. You ever run through BG2 with four druids?)

@SomeSort You do know you can roll six player made characters in BG as well, right? Experimentation is discouraged because the game is skewed HEAVILY against magic users, because again, you have required bosses in IWD that are immune to magic.

It's remarkable how spells like Breach and True Sight (that are must-have spells in BG2) are made almost useless in IWD. On the other hand, spells which we rarely use in BG2 (like for example, Protection from Normal Missiles and Shield, because everyone is using magical weapons and arrows there) become highly useful here.

(like PFNM against Shadowed Archers in Severed Hand, and Shield against Imbued Wights and Drow Sorcerers)

Although surviving in IWD is hard for magic users, or to be more precise, for mages, there is still a lot of scope for experimentation and creative battle tactics.

It's simply a different experience. There are tricks here too... It's only easy if you have a Fighter type character.

@SomeSort You do know you can roll six player made characters in BG as well, right? Experimentation is discouraged because the game is skewed HEAVILY against magic users, because again, you have required bosses in IWD that are immune to magic.

There's no boss in IWD that is immune to magic. (At least, this was true pre-HoW; I'm unsure how the expansion changed Belhifet's resistances.)

Again, I *soloed the original release with a conjurer*. How does one complete a solo game? By defeating all required bosses. How does a Conjurer defeat enemies? Spoilers: with magic.

For starters, Belhifet wasn't *immune* to magic, he was *highly resistant* to magic. (I believe the original percentage was 80-90%.) If you cast magic missile on him, one or two usually got through to deal damage. There were stories early on of people trying Chromatic Orb on him, bypassing his magic resistance and getting a lucky roll on the saving throw, and leaving him stunned for over a turn / easy pickings.

Second, he wasn't even properly highly resistant to magic, he was highly resistant to *directly targeted magic*, which is a subset of all magic. Belhifet was not resistant to, say, casting haste on your entire party to double your murderspeed. (And, indeed, few adventurers back then would dare face Belhifet without Haste handy.)

Nor was he, or any enemy in the entire game, resistant to monster summoning (unlike BG2, where every hedge mage on every street corner has at least three Death Spells memorized), or to Tenser's Transformation, which was the method I used to take him down in my attempt. (Icewind Dale Tenser's was *baller* because it granted an extra APR.) The metaknowledge I needed for my solo was how to manipulate RNG to make sure my mage had a weapon with a high-enough enchantment to hit him in the first place, because the only +4 weapon a mage could equip was random loot.

Again, let me stress this. I killed Belhifit with a magic user using magic, which seems odd given that apparently Belhifet was immune to magic and the game forced you to use non-magic to kill him. Indeed, if we're going to call Belhifet "immune to magic", then we're going to have to call Firkraag and all of the BG2 liches "immune to magic", because they have comparable resistance to direct magic effects.

Icewind Dale wasn't skewed heavily against magic users. It was skewed heavily against having two full arcane casters because of limited scrolls, (though Mage + Bard or Mage + Fighter/Mage were both popular). And it was definitely skewed heavily against single-target damage spells and in favor of buffs / debuffs / area-of-effect spells. But buffs / debuffs / AoE spells are... still magic. As is divine spellcasting, which was *much* more effective in IWD than in BG2 (see: Druid's non-sucky spell selection, Righteous Wrath of the Faithful, and hordes of undead).

I don't know about original IWD, but in IWDEE Belhifet wears a ring that makes him immune to spell levels 1-9 and has dozens of specific spell protections to take care of area-effect spells. Summons and buffs help against him, of course, but I'd still say he's legitimately immune to magic.

@SomeSort Yes, but you also stated that you had to rely on metaknowledge to succeed in your solo. A balanced only for expert players, isn't really balanced at all.

I'm not saying IWD is BAD. I'm saying its balance isn't that great. But it scratches a specific game itch VERY well. It does what it does very well. I'm gonna stop derailing this thread now.

I needed metaknowledge for my solo not because IWD was balanced for expert players, but because IWD was not balanced for solo.

The reason I tried the solo was because I was on an IWD message board and there was a debate as to whether a solo mage was even possible. This was just a month or two after the game came out, mind. A few other classes had been soloed, but mages were especially gimped in the attempt because the scroll scarcity meant they couldn't even "overlevel" for each challenge properly; you might have level 7 spell slots, but if the highest level scroll you found was level 5, they weren't doing you much good.

(Yes, this was unbalanced. But like I said, IWD was never balanced for solo, and especially not for a solo mage. It was balanced so that mages were getting useful spells in a timely manner during a full party-of-6 run-through.)

And as I mentioned, the bulk of the metaknowledge I needed was the random item loot tables, because soloing a mage required rather specific gear, some of which was not guaranteed to drop in a given playthrough.

@SomeSort Yes, but you also stated that you had to rely on metaknowledge to succeed in your solo. A balanced only for expert players, isn't really balanced at all.

@ThacoBell I'll have to heavily disagree on that point. Saying that any of the IE games is unbalanced because you require metaknowledge to succeed in a solo run is silly, because ALL of the games were designed with a party in mind. Yes, you can go solo, but it's clearly not what the developers envisioned and the game is not built around or balanced for it. The most obvious example are the many insta kill traps in BG2. You either have a thief, cast detect traps with a spellcaster or use meta knowledge to go around them/use summons to trigger them. But if you dont use metaknowledge to know exactly where they are your solo run is gonna turn into a reload fest. Same with many status conditions, if that single character doesnt save, bam, dead. But in a party, someone may save and deal with the situation.Going solo is an exercise on fooling the system, its a fun experience, but you cant rate the games based on that style of playthrough. Maybe a mage cant beat the whole game by himself, I dont know, but Im sure he can do a heck of a lot for his party.

I don't know about original IWD, but in IWDEE Belhifet wears a ring that makes him immune to spell levels 1-9 and has dozens of specific spell protections to take care of area-effect spells. Summons and buffs help against him, of course, but I'd still say he's legitimately immune to magic.

In the original IWD Belhifet's ring (BRING.itm) only provided the ability to see invisible creatures. The expansion HoW added the spell immunities, and since IWDEE is based on TotLM...

I play IWD for many years and way more than I play BG(2) and I still don't know what's the optimal proficiency/items/party composition. No amount of metagame knowledge help me in that game - that's why it's awesome. All I know is that every single class matters - as an example: a fighter in IWD is nothing without the support of a cleric.

The dialogues variation gives this game even more reasons to be played over and over again.

For BG(2) I know how to optimize several classes and party compositions, from Candlekeep to Suldanesselar (I never finished ToB as I find it absolutely boring). To make this trilogy something close to be challenging I have to use things like crippled stats and anti-RP decisions like letting Carsomyr behind.

Never fully played PST as I also find it absolutely boring, but IMHO IWD is by far the best IE game.